This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

The node_stats metricset interrogates the
Cluster API endpoint of
Elasticsearch to get the cluster nodes statistics. The data received is only for the local node so this Metricbeat has
to be run on each Elasticsearch node.

The indices stats are node-specific. That means for example the total number of docs reported by all nodes together is not the total number of documents in all indices as there can also be replicas.